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Sunday, March 2, 2008

Row row row your boat...3 (2008)

Thursday 28th of February started out hectic for me, but not nearly as hectic as it ended up being. The kids at the factory ended up saving our neck.

In the first video you can see a car that was floating towards our store. Luckily, the bars that I had installed on the curb stopped its progress. The kids thought that the store window was going to break against the onslaught of waves from the passing buses that went by, but the glass held.

This street gets flooded every year. We knew that and that is why we installed these metal flood doors in front of the store and inside behind the garage door. We also gave the building some height. In the past, the flood doors would keep the water at bay, but this time it was higher.

One of the kids filmed these on his phone. I was out running an errand when the storm hit and I was trying to make it back to the factory, but it was impossible. I was hoping to at least cut off the access to the street to make sure that the buses would not try to go through.

The water ended up going higher than what is shown in either of these videos. The water line itself did not end up going over the flood doors, but the waves did.

In the end, there was no damage done from the water. We did loose a batch of brownies though due to the lack of electricity that hit while they were in the oven.

These kids kept the water from reaching our elevator shaft through quick thinking on their end. I am actually very proud of them.

The mayor of the city has promised that he will make the necessary improvements to the city so that these floods do not happen again. This is a mayor with a goal set on the President´s chair in the future, so he might actually do something about this. In any case, I will wait and see.

Some more positive things I took from this event came from Edenor. They came out and made improvements to the substation that houses the transformer serving our block. Apparently they physically moved the transformer so that it would be out of reach of the water or at least it would not be as exposed to flooding as it has in the past. I wrote about the last flood in post 1 and 2 titled "Row Row Row Your Boat". They even informed us as to when they were going to cut electricity, and when they had to enter our factory they even took their muddy boots off. They kept the downtime to a minimum and came around to do a final check before they left for the day. Now that is class and great customer service.